The Case for Civic Nationalism

“If carefully constructed, civic nationalism in the United States can take both conservative and progressive forms.”

In some ways, the United States has never been a single nation. The varieties of culture, values, accents, tastes, religious and ethnic makeup, and views of the role of government have always ranged widely across the country. After Colin Woodard’s book American Nations appeared in 2011, many websites shared the book’s map of the                    “cultural nations” of North America, an illustration of divides that are much more complex than those between states and parties. Many of these divides are far older than the United States itself. This centuries-old diversity and the conflicts that have come with it—not only the Civil War but other outbursts of violence as well as wars of words—may seem to make the idea of an American nation a fantasy. And that is before we add all the forms of diversity that cause so much contention in 21st century America into the mix.

In another sense, though, the United States has always been a nation. In the sense that a country is a nation—albeit not the only kind of nation a person can belong to—the thirteen colonies declaring independence from Great Britain created one. The authors of the Constitution made the young country even more of a nation, creating a new, strong federal government and pushing back against the idea that each state was effectively its own country. As Alexander Hamilton put it in the Federalist Papers, “A nation, without a national government, is, in my view, an awful spectacle.”

Whatever conflicts have divided Americans, there has always been an American nation in this sense, a country with a national government making laws governing everyone within its borders. Whatever damage some of those laws have inflicted—and however many people have been denied full political participation—the federal government has always been there, a mechanism for bringing Americans together and empowering the disempowered, whenever enough citizens have been motivated to use it that way. The mere fact that such a government exists is enough to bind the disparate groups, sects, and factions within the country into a nation.

As much as diversity benefits the United States, it also makes it more difficult for Americans to understand, respect, and tolerate one another. Even people with no particular animus against those different from them can easily find themselves divided along lines of ethnicity, religion, culture, and politics, and it is unrealistic to hope for Americans to see and understand all the benefits of diversity in their daily lives. This is especially true if they are haughtily told that unease or mixed feelings about greater diversity is a sign of bigotry, or an attempt to protect “privilege.”